One More Thin Gypsy Thief
by VeryDoubtfulGuest
Summary: After the war, after her marriage to Ron, after the kids have gone home. Hermione at the fair. With profound apologies to Leonard Cohen.


It was cold. True, autumnal cold, with the few remaining leaves on the trees gone boney and brittle, and great drab drifts of their dead fellows heaping themselves in crannies and crevices. The children had been fussing, but Hermione was uncharacteristically short with them; Ron had taken one look at the grief limning her eyes, offered a rueful smile, and hustled them off home. "Mommy will come along later," he assured them as they headed for the portkey that would take them home from the fair. "Sometimes she needs to think about people who're gone."

And he was right. Sometimes she did need to think, alone, without the children she adored or the man she loved clinging to her strength. The cutting wind made her feel feral, restless; she bared her teeth to it and moved back into the thinning crowds and lengthening shadows. She tugged her hair free of its clip. She loosened her stride. She did not notice when people edged away from her vulpine smile.

A wizarding fair would make Muggle children stare in astonishment. The games are magical, the crowd bewitching, the performances prone to random explosions. Only two things are the same. Scent is one, of course. Cotton candy and illicit drink and sawdust and smoke and beneath it all a sad, desperate excitement as people who lead boring lives pretend to find their thrills. The other is the dark, watchful gaze of the Rom. Neither wizard nor Muggle, betwixt and between, the Gypsies can move in both worlds, though they are trusted in neither. So when Hermione felt eyes on her, and turned her head, and spied the whip-thin, appraising smile of a dark man leaning against a tent pole, she hardly thought to give him a second glance. Until he spoke.

"Fine night for it."

She stopped. She turned. There was no mistaking the voice. _That _voice, bourbon-smoked and baiting, impossible to forget even after all these years. His skin had never been so swarthy, nor his gaze so frankly hungry, but...

"You're supposed to be dead," she whispered. Her mouth was dry.

"I have no idea what you're talking about, dear lady," he answered, a denial made wholly unconvincing by the wicked bite of his smile. There was a great deal of silver in his hair, now. He wore it long, and a frost of stubble sharpened the planes of his face. He pushed himself upright with one shoulder, away from the tent, turning to vanish into the dimness behind it, and she thought surely she was imagining things, surely she was mistaken despite the stalking movements she remembered so well. She'd blink, and he would resolve into someone else, not this terrifying half-stranger, this man she saw die.

He looked back over his shoulder. Silent. Challenging. She took a deep breath and followed him into darkness.

His shadow melded with the lightless, breathless space, flitting before her. She could barely manage to keep up as he lead her on, on, through twists and turns behind walls of plywood and canvas, past spills of random light cast through cracks in boards long since warped out of true. A liminal space, then, no larger than a closet. She had to slip sideways to enter, nearly missed it save for the fact that the fabric still swayed. She could barely see, but his scent was all around her, and the guilty thrill of it heated her, rendered her molten between her thighs.

"You're beautiful, now," he murmured, almost accusingly. "I should've known, Miss Granger, you'd excell in that as well. Ah, but it isn't Miss Granger, anymore, is it?" He stepped closer, and her hands came up to rest, trembling, against his chest. A sharp inhale, like a hiss, from above her head. She could feel his heartbeat against her fingertips. "Mrs. Weasley." He drew out each syllable, mocking her. "Alone in the dark with a strange man."

"Strangest I've ever known," she whispered, and he laughed, one more thin gypsy thief, before his mouth came down on hers in a bruising kiss.

A virtuous woman would slap him. A helpless woman would melt against him. This was the place for neither, so she met him fire for fire, fisting her hand in his hair and pulling him down, herself up, so the kiss was a struggle not a submission. It seemed to make him crazy; he growled against her lips, slammed her backwards against a post, cupped her ass with his long-fingered hands and forced her against his hardness. She mewled in need, drawing another mocking laugh from him as he rocked against her.

His hands found the waist of her skirt, tugged free the tails of her shirt, slid quick as serpents beneath. Then he was cupping her breasts, pinching her nipples to peaks of pleasured pain, his voice going on and on about her beauty, her wickedness, how he'd known all along he'd have her, at least once, somehow, would brand her with his mouth. She was writhing like a madwoman by the time he drew up her skirt and slip, pushed aside the prim white cotton of her panties, stroked one clever finger into her liquid core.

She nearly went off then, rocket hard, nothing on her tongue but hallelujah. But he teased her, varying the speed and rhythm of his touches until she called him a bastard and bit his shoulder hard enough to taste copper. Then he swore, and lifted her, and drove into her there against the wall, and she had to bite him again to keep from wailing. He whispered her name, "Hermione, God, yes. Wanted this for so long..." She clenched around him, seizing, and came so hard her ears rang and her vision faded as she bucked. Three more strokes and he joined her, giving vent not to a snarl or a profanity but a sob, breaking her heart as he spent inside her.

************

The youngest of the Granger-Weasley brood is every bit as pale as her ruddier older brothers, though she only freckles in the sun. She's clever, like her mother; in fact, her mother's features are stamped clearly upon her face. But unlike her brothers, she has eyes as dark as the shadows of an autumn carnival. Ron often says she has his grandfather's eyes.


End file.
